ANDREW LUSH:

And minimize OBS so that isn't tempted to watch himself during the interview.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Okay.

ANDREW LUSH:

Oh, right. You're good on that. Okay. I'm going to hit record to the cloud on zoom. This is just a backup cause it's the same camera. Let's just turn off our microphones and cameras

ANDREW LUSH:

and let us know if you need anything. We'll be here. Have a great interview.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. Okay. So, Louis, I'm a queer activist and a film curator. And this work that I do with OUTWORDS is a really wonderful way, as a member of the LGBTQ community, to just be in dialogue with people and learn from other people's experiences.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm really excited to get to know you through our conversation today. I'm sure this has been relayed to you, but just to reiterate, the audience for this interview is LGBTQ folks of all ages who are eager to get to know you and hear your story. I think first things first, if you can say your name and where you were born and raised, that would be great.

LOUIS JACINTO:

My name is Louis Jacinto and I was born in Bakersfield, California.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. And how would you describe the home that you grew up in?

LOUIS JACINTO:

It was my parents. I was the oldest of five siblings, three sisters and then a brother, but my brother passed away as an infant, a couple of months after he was born.

LOUIS JACINTO:

My parents worked, but after all the children were born, my mom stopped working just to care for the home. And my father continued to work. He worked for the railroad. He was in the rail yard working. That was a great perk because it meant that we could travel by train for free anywhere. So my parents would take advantage of that and we'd take trips on the train. It was wonderful.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Well, that is wonderful. I'm curious if you can identify any values in your household as you were coming of age; was it particularly conservative or progressive?

LOUIS JACINTO:

It was very progressive. Every night we watched the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite. My parents subscribed to Look Magazine,

LOUIS JACINTO:

which was a large format photojournalistic magazine, somewhat like Life. We would get that. I don't recall if it came in every month or twice a month, but I would devour it. It was mostly photographs to illustrate the story that was being reported. When we got old enough,

LOUIS JACINTO:

my mom would always talk politics. They always voted. Once I was of age, I have voted in every election, whether local or national. We always were aware of what was happening in the world, even though we were living in a small town, at least Bakersfield was a small town at the time when I was growing up.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

So the magazine was sort of a window into the wider world for you?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes. I wouldn't say it was a window, but it just showed that we also were a part of everything else that was happening, not just in the country, but worldwide. I never felt isolated or anything like that from the rest of the world, but rather a part of.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's amazing. And was faith a part of your environment growing up? Does religion factor into your life?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes. We were raised Roman Catholic. Through the years as an adult, I've heard people say, "Oh, I'm a recovering Catholic." I never felt that way. When I feel like doing group worship today, I'll go back to a church service because that's what I know and that's what I'm familiar with. I felt that

LOUIS JACINTO:

because we went to Catholic grammar school, so we were very connected and involved with our church. And I always felt that my Roman Catholic upbringing was a cultural experience rather than a spiritual experience, because even before I had begun formal religious training, I had already somehow had this connection with God. Somehow I knew that the bottom line,

LOUIS JACINTO:

it was between God and I. Jesus and all the rest of them were all middlemen and stepping stones to get to God. I felt, well, I already got to God, so the church, my church experience then will be a cultural experience. My grandparents on both sides of my family are from Mexico. So strong Mexican traditions practiced in my family.

LOUIS JACINTO:

That included the strong Mexican Roman Catholic traditions that also happened. It was for me, again, a very cultural experience being a Roman Catholic, rather than a spiritual one.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

It sounds like you had the advantage of being very grounded from a young age, which is great. At what age did you identify as gay?

LOUIS JACINTO:

I came out just before I graduated from high school. Before then, the earliest I can remember is I remember in like first grade, maybe having what I would now call a crush on one of the other boys in class. I remember one time asking him "Hey, do you want me to walk you home?"

LOUIS JACINTO:

I didn't understand it, there was no word for it. Very young, very young, I felt that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Was that someone you gravitated towards during childhood, you felt like a ray of light almost, like someone you felt comfortable with and were able to be yourself with?

LOUIS JACINTO:

No. No that didn't happen until I actually came out and started seeking out other queer people.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

So who was that first person that you came out to?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Well, to myself. What I did is, I had a cousin, she's four years older than I. By that time, she was already in college in San Francisco, and I felt really close to her. She was also very progressive.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I think she was one person who also influenced my political views. I wrote her a letter, because I had gone and visited her over an extended weekend -- I think it was in February, the president's day weekend. I went to go visit her in San Francisco. When I got home, I decided I was going to write her a letter,

LOUIS JACINTO:

thanking her for the great time. And then I just threw in the line, "Do you think I should tell my parents I'm gay?" and then continued on with the rest of the letter. She wrote back immediately, said no, do not tell them that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Well, it's wonderful that you felt that she was a receptive sounding book. And how old were you at that time when you wrote that letter?

LOUIS JACINTO:

17

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Amazing. What age then did you self-identify as an artist?

LOUIS JACINTO:

After high school, I went to college in Bakersfield, my hometown. There were two colleges there, the four year college and then the two year college. I went to the two year college and I started to take photography classes there.

LOUIS JACINTO:

That, I think, is when I told myself, Oh, you know, I like this photography thing. I like the images that I'm making with them. So it was probably then, my first year of college after high school.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You've lived in Los Angeles for over 40 years now. What age were you when you came to LA?

LOUIS JACINTO:

I was 19. I finished my two years of college in Bakersfield and then I transferred to the four-year institution and I chose Los Angeles. I was thinking of either Los Angeles or San Francisco, but for me, San Francisco is a city. I think it's California's only city.

LOUIS JACINTO:

But I decided to come to Los Angeles because I always see myself as a country boy, a small town country boy. I saw Los Angeles as Bakersfield times 100, just one very large, small town. And I thought, you know, I think I can handle that, living in an actual city like San Francisco, I may not be able to. So I made the decision to move here.

LOUIS JACINTO:

That was in 1975, and I started my third year of college at Cal state Los Angeles.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's interesting that I felt more, like a safer option almost, San Francisco is too intimidating.

LOUIS JACINTO:

It was beautiful, but not to live there, I felt

LUCY MUKERJEE:

So for over 40 years now, you've had Los Angeles as almost a canvas for your work.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You've documented every corner of the city. Do you feel like you know LA inside out or does it still surprise you sometimes?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Well, I think the town itself is the same but the people, now there's more people. There's a lot of people that weren't born when I arrived that are now born and living and grown.

LOUIS JACINTO:

So, it's the same. One thing that I noticed when I moved to Los Angeles, of course, I started to make friends, other kids on campus who were born and raised here in Los Angeles. And there were a lot of them for -- Well, one of the first things I noticed is I felt Los Angeles was very segregated, and I didn't feel that in Bakersfield. I thought, wow, for being so big with so many people,

LOUIS JACINTO:

Los Angeles is kind of backwards, when I'm comparing it to Bakersfield in that sense about being segregated. Then as I started to make friends, especially with kids who were from Los Angeles, a lot of them had never been anywhere. It's like they never left Los Angeles. As I mentioned earlier, we'd jump on a train and take trips. We'd go places and see the rest of the world,

LOUIS JACINTO:

not, you know. We'd see something outside of our small town. I was really surprised that a lot of them had never really been anywhere. It was just odd.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's a good observation. I can totally relate to that. I think the time that I spent in LA felt like somehow comes to feel like the center of the universe, almost. You're almost tricked into thinking you don't need to go anywhere else,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

but it's so great that you have that grounding from your formative years, that the world was much bigger than your local environment. I'd like to talk about your body of work. I think it's almost like a time capsule for the changing politics and culture that you've experienced over your lifetime. The spirit of social justice comes through loud and clear from your street photography to the punk rock scene work.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How would you describe the themes that recur in your photography?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Well, I do think it goes back to my upbringing about being aware about what was going on politically and socially in the world. It was the 1960s and it was a huge upheaval. I started high school in 1969,

LOUIS JACINTO:

and a lot of things continue to happen into the seventies. But during the sixties, watching the news every day, there were all of these protests and fighting for social justice. I remember always feeling, "Gosh, I wish I was older so that I could be out there helping make these changes." I think that's what it is. I didn't graduate from high school with a degree in any kind of arts field.

LOUIS JACINTO:

My degree is in sociology, and actually I think that may have worked well for me because unlike psychology where you look inward, sociology, you look out into the world and see what's happening there. And I think that that guided my photographic eye and vision, to look out and see what was going on, and try to capture it.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Who have been some of the more recognizable subjects in your work, some of the images that have become iconic?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Well, my first body of work was the punk rock music scene in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Probably the most iconic image is Alice Bag, who was the lead singer of a band called the Bags.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I have one image that has been used many times in documentaries, articles. Alice herself has reemerged as a musician, a full-time musician. She wrote a memoir of her time growing up and then getting into the punk scene, and she asked

LOUIS JACINTO:

if a photograph of hers that I had could be on the cover of her biography. So I would say she's the one, and I get contacted by people saying, "Oh, we're interviewing Alice. Can we use some of your images?" So I would say the Bags are the ones. The thing about the punk rock scene, I don't know what was happening in the rest of the towns with their punk rock scenes, but here in Los Angeles, I think that the punk rock scene reflected the city itself,

LOUIS JACINTO:

which is extremely diverse. The initial scene, everybody was there, both in the bands and in the audience; boys and girls, queer, straight, in between, black, white, Asian, Brown, everybody was there. And they weren't talking about destruction of property.

LOUIS JACINTO:

They were talking about destruction of injustice. All of the bands were doing that, all of them. How it affected society, how it was affecting them individually, through their songs. And that continued on until about 1980.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Then what happened is the scene started to change in Los Angeles, all of the white skinhead boy punk bands started coming in, I would say from orange County, and everything stopped. It wasn't the scene that the punks had originally created in Los Angeles, which was great and very diverse and accepting

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thinking about that environment the different attitudes and people you encountered

LUCY MUKERJEE:

did you find yourself coming face to face with discrimination? And how did you avoid it?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Not in the punk scene. But in the gay scene, yes. Not all of my friends went into the punk scene. Some of them were like, Oh, you're getting into punk?

LOUIS JACINTO:

But when I would go with a friend to a discotheque, for example, it just depended on the person at the door making the decision, if I would be allowed in or not. Maybe there were already too many Brown people in the discotheque and so I wouldn't be allowed in some place, but that was in the gay scene, but not in the punk scene at all.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'd love to hear some of your highlights of that period of your life, of working in the punk scene, and capturing the energy, that vibe, that crowd, are there some standout experiences that you can share with us.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I remember one time, and I can't remember the band's name, but I went to go listen to them,

LOUIS JACINTO:

I was there with my friends. They started performing and after the first song, I started yelling at them, "That song sucks," "That went nowhere, it's not telling us a good story." I would just start yelling at them like that. How dare I, actually? This was their art, this is what they wanted to do, but I wanted something more from them. I was telling them,

LOUIS JACINTO:

it's not cutting it for me. Of course, they got angry and would yell back at me. So I remember that really clearly. I was friends with just one band. When I moved to Los Angeles, I met Gerardo Velazquez. He was also a student at Cal state LA, and he became my first friend in Los Angeles. We hit it off because it turns out he had every Yoko Ono album and so did I,

LOUIS JACINTO:

so we were rarities. When punk rock hit a couple of years later, Gerado, and I agreed that all these kids finally caught up to Yoko Ono. So we were very excited and we'd go to the punk shows. Then he decided to start his own band called Nervous Gender, which was very diverse; Gerardo's queer, Mike, basically it was a band, it had Phranc

LOUIS JACINTO:

who was Jewish lesbian, Gerado and Mike who were Latin X queers, Edward Stapleton, who was this queer kid from Ireland originally. So, I was friends with them, but all of the other bands, I was not friends with them because to me, I was this kid with a camera and they were stars, because they were on stage performing.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I kept my distance from them. I didn't try to become their friends or anything like that. I think because of that distance I maintained, I was able to capture them in their performances like a

[inaudible], I guess. They didn't know me, so they weren't playing to me, and I just caught them playing to the entire audience. Back then,

LOUIS JACINTO:

it was easy to go backstage at some of the famous venues, like the Starwood, or the Whiskey a Go Go. You could just walk backstage, nobody was ... Plus, they were punk bands, so the owners of those establishments didn't think much of them other than they can draw a crowd and have kids paying at the door. So I'd go backstage with the Bags and shoot them. The Go-Go's, when they were still punk,

LOUIS JACINTO:

backstage and shoot them. That was really great, to be able to do that, also was a great thing.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Did you feel, at that time, that you were able to express all of the identities that you embody being a gay Chicano artist? In your element, were you feeling your power?

LOUIS JACINTO:

When I moved to Los Angeles and started Cal state LA, previously in Bakersfield, I was involved with the United Farm Workers, on campus. I would sit at their table in the quad and pass out pamphlets, whatever it was. So I continued doing that in Los Angeles

LOUIS JACINTO:

cause there was a chapter of the United Farm Workers on campus. But then some of the kids, there had been a gay student union before on campus, but it had dissolved. A couple of kids decided to bring it back, so I got involved with them. Some days I'd be sitting at the United Farm Workers table and then some days I'd be sitting at the gay student union table. And when the United Farm Worker kids would see me, they were like,

LOUIS JACINTO:

what are you doing? You can't be at both tables. That was the impression that they gave to me. How could I? But I don't think the road gets narrow in life, I think it's wide with so many things to see along the way.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I felt like I was all of those things, because I was in all of those circles; I was in the punk circle, I was in the gay disco circle, I was in the local art scene circle, I was in the community organizing circle. I was doing it all and that's how I felt complete. I couldn't leave something out.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's amazing that you were able to straddle all these intersections of your identity. How do you feel like that acceptance of your authentic self has come through in your work?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Well, I think it, it shows that I'm not just photographing the same thing over and over again -- at least I hope not to.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I photograph the punk rock bands. And then in 1980 I stopped. The last punk band I photographed from that period was a band called Los Illegals. And it was on December 3rd, 1980. They performed at an art opening on campus, at Cal state LA, and then five days later, John Lennon was murdered.

LOUIS JACINTO:

The Beatles were my big heroes, idols as a kid. John Lennon had gone into seclusion. While he was there with Yoko, punk happened. And then in 1980, they both came back out. I was very excited. I was happy that John was making records again, but I was more excited that Yoko was making records again because she hadn't made anything. I thought, Oh, this is going to be great. But then he was murdered.

LOUIS JACINTO:

So that was it for me. I just said, "I'm done. I'm done with this whole photographing bands." The scene was changing as I had mentioned previously before, so I moved on. It was the eighties now, I'm in the Silver Lake and Echo Park, Los Feliz communities of Los Angeles,

LOUIS JACINTO:

which I think are still the most diverse in the city, everybody's there, ethnically, racially, economically, always a large queer community in those parts of town. They started the Sunset Junction Street Fair in 1980, which went on for 30 years. They hired me to be their official photographer for the fair for 1981 and 1982.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Because of that, I was able to document the queer community working with the gang involved youth in those communities, side by side, to celebrate everyone in the community, not leaving anyone out. I think that work by those organizers has progressed the city of Los Angeles into what we are now,

LOUIS JACINTO:

for the better, all the way back, starting in 1980. So I started photographing, of course, some of the gay pride parades that were happening. I was able to photograph it when it was still on Hollywood Boulevard, before it eventually moved to West Hollywood.

LOUIS JACINTO:

And I also got involved with a group called Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos, which was a social organizing group which organized some events in town. I was also working with Frontiers magazine, which was a gay publication in Los Angeles. I would go and cover everything from politics

LOUIS JACINTO:

to AIDS protests and commemorations and things like that. Then of course, I was always doing my own personal photography. I did a lot of self-portraiture. I always come up with ideas and I would always ask friends, "Hey, would you mind posing for me in this way?"

LOUIS JACINTO:

And they always said, yes. I was grateful for that. I just didn't want to keep photographing the same thing over and over again. As I mentioned, the Beatles were like my favorite band, so maybe I was trying to be like the Beatles where each album sounded completely different than the previous one. And I thought, yeah, that's great. They want to keep doing different things.

LOUIS JACINTO:

With my photography, I want to keep doing different things. I don't want to keep photographing the same thing for 40 years.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah. That's really great. You pushed yourself to try different styles and to express yourself in different ways until you found the places that you felt most represented your own unique style.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Now, of course, a challenge that artists often face is the tug of war between being yourself and being commercial or getting paid to do what you love. Did you ever turn down work because it felt like it was against your principle?

LOUIS JACINTO:

A couple, like when my sister got married, she asked if I would photograph her wedding, and I thought, well, sure, of course.

LOUIS JACINTO:

But I thought, God, I'll never do that again. I like the pictures, but no, I don't want to photograph weddings. I might go to a friend or a family member's wedding and photograph snapshots in my own way, but not document the whole thing.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That makes sense. What artists have influenced or inspired your work over the years?

LOUIS JACINTO:

I liked the work? Well, I think the first time, Oh, I think his name is Robert Freeman. I think I was about in the fourth grade when I saw A Hard Day's Night, which was the Beatles' first film. And of course, I was crazy about the Beatles. At the end of that film,

LOUIS JACINTO:

when they run the credits, you know films in black and white, it's a quick montage of the Beatles individually. It'd be like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then A Hard Day's Night, then boom, boom, boom, boom, directed by, then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I remember thinking, gosh, those portraits of them are so beautiful and they're in black and white and they're just great.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I think I must've been subconsciously, at that point, is when I thought, I think I want to do it. And then a lot of the photographs in Look Magazine that would come to the house when I was a kid were all in black and white, and I just thought those grays and blacks were so powerful in telling a story. Sometimes, without any words, you know?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because I think that's something that your work does very well is tell a story, and until I was preparing for this interview, I hadn't thought about photographers as storytellers, but that's exactly what you are. Can you expand on that a little bit? That theory?

LOUIS JACINTO:

I took a little break from exhibiting in the 1990s. I kept photographing, but I made no effort to exhibit my work at all. I just needed to take a break from that. I guess maybe it had become a grind, to a degree. When I decided to do that again, I did start off with my punk rock photographs.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Suddenly, people were interested in what had happened in the seventies. I saw that there was going to be a photo show of punk rock, so I submitted some examples to the gallery and they said, Oh, this will be great. You can be in the show. It was just a two artists show. I had one of the galleries and the other artist had the other gallery. And that was it, it just took off. Those punk rock images have gotten me just not into gallery shows, but into museum shows,

LOUIS JACINTO:

it's been amazing. This was like 2005, and I wasn't photographing punk rock anymore, I just didn't want to be known as the punk rock photographer. I grew up in the time of film, especially when I was in college, I had to make every shot count.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I just could not like today with digital, you can shoot as many as you want and you don't have to pay for the development of it. But back then, I learned how to make every shot count because I was a poor college student. I didn't have the extra money really to be, even though it was like $3 to develop a film. No. That was still a lot of money back then.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I resisted digital. I kept shooting film. But then eventually, I decided to embrace digital. What I did is I made a story up about Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo, never in her lifetime, never visited Los Angeles, ever. So I decided to make up a story that she did,

LOUIS JACINTO:

where she went, who she visited and why, who she stayed with. I photograph different scenes in Los Angeles, and then I digitally added Frida Kahlo into them. And I made up the story, like, she's standing at the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl, and she's there, and she's saying

LOUIS JACINTO:

and this is very nice, it's quaint. Because remember she comes from Mexico City, which is a huge city, but she thinks it's quaint here in Los Angeles. It shows her at Grauman's Chinese theater looking at the hand prints of Edward G. Robinson because she knew him and he had bought her work because he would always travel to Mexico to go meet Diego Rivera. That was my first dive into the digital world.

LOUIS JACINTO:

But it told a story, even though it was a made up story. And I just continue to do that. What I tend to do now -- and I guess I always have, maybe -- I come up with an idea and then I create a body of work around it. Sometimes it's ongoing, sometimes I do it and it's finished. That's what I do.

LOUIS JACINTO:

That's how I think I try to push myself and tell a story. I have a series about floating signage. One day I was walking to a friend's studio, he lives in downtown. He lives next to this big sign that says, "Jesus Saves." When I was walking to his place, right at that moment,

LOUIS JACINTO:

that sign ... Because it's just giant letters, it's not on a billboard or anything. The sun was hitting it so the message "Jesus Saves," the shadow of it was on the sign. And I thought, Oh, I gotta capture that. I didn't have my camera, so I kept trying to go back to capture it and I couldn't get the right time of day. I just turned around and I shot the sign, but it was backwards, I was standing behind it

LOUIS JACINTO:

and that's when I thought, Oh, you know what I'm going to do? It was film, I'm going to scan this negative and then digitally, I'm going to remove the posts, so it still says, "Jesus saves," just the way it is, but it's floating. At the time when I did that, it was the time of Sarah Palin running for vice president. And I just thought, these people have it backwards. They're claiming Jesus,

LOUIS JACINTO:

but they don't sound like what I know of Jesus. They've got it backwards. So I started doing a series where, in black and white, I would look for that type of signage where I could stand behind it and photograph it and then remove the postings, so that they're just floating. Then their color counterparts are just straight looking signs, but I also remove it so that the sign is floating above the building.

LOUIS JACINTO:

It's my Getting It Backwards, Floating Away series, and that's ongoing. If I see a sign that looks beautiful, I think, Oh, that'd be even more beautiful floating above the building.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's very clever, thank you for sharing that. You, very modestly, touched on the fact that your work is on display in galleries and museums across the country.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm curious, I've never been able to ask an artist this question before, so forgive me if it's ignorant, but do you go in person to visit all of these exhibits while your work is being shown? Do you have that ability to be able to see and witness it in person?

LOUIS JACINTO:

If it's traveling, no. Of course, that would be expensive. But if it's nearby, I do or I'll try. I've had a few shows that have traveled and opened in New York after they opened it in Los Angeles.

LOUIS JACINTO:

And so I was able to go to those openings. This last traveling show which is, currently because of the pandemic, stuck in Ohio, because that's the last place it opened, and then it just stopped. It was supposed to then travel and close in Boston. But what I started to do, I started to ask

LOUIS JACINTO:

the organization that was curating the show, the museum show, if they had any funding in their budget to send me as one of the artists. And of course, I'm always thinking, I can't ask them that. But my partner says, "They have tons of money, ask them." And so each time they've said yes, so I've been able to go.

LOUIS JACINTO:

He says, you have no idea, the curators are so happy when they have an actual artist in the show there at the opening, they can talk about their work and it really makes it a better opening. So now, I just ask. If it's no, it's no, but they've been saying yes.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's such a wonderful lesson. Ask and you shall receive.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I wanted to know if you've been able to take photographs in Mexico.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Okay. Yes, actually. I started a series ... There's an artist named Llyn Foulkes, he's in his eighties. He had a big show a few years back at the Hammer museum here in Los Angeles. I went to go see the show as a larger retrospective. I was familiar with his work, he did a series of paintings like from here up,

LOUIS JACINTO:

and it's someone in a suit and all of that. But then their head is like, it looked like somebody got a hatchet or something or an ax and just chopped off the side of their head, so they're kind of bloody looking in a way. Still oddly beautiful, but you know, still like, Ooh. And this guy is in his eighties and still creating new work, that's my goal. I just want to keep going.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I thought, you know what? I want to create something that's just gonna pop someone's head off. He inspired me, but I couldn't think of anything. Then it hit me. So what I did is, in my travels, I started photographing the high-end mannequins in the storefronts, in the different cities. Beverly Hills, New York, San Francisco,

LOUIS JACINTO:

and actually even in Mexico City when I was there. And because I've done so much self-portraiture since the beginning, I have hundreds of images of myself. What I started doing is on these mannequins, which are in color, I started putting my black and white head on top of them. And in all of the mannequins,

LOUIS JACINTO:

because I have so many self-portraits, none of the heads are the same, so it's a different head each time. My thoughts about that series is that, for years, we are bombarded by advertisements that say, if you do this, if you wear this, if you say this, you will be perfect and complete. And those things are difficult to reach.

LOUIS JACINTO:

How can you have a waistline that small? How can you afford that dress? You can't, for the most part. But now, I am complete. I am wearing that expensive dress. My waistline is just the perfect size, so now I am complete. The images themselves, they're funny, they're kind of grotesque, they're everything.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Hopefully what I'm saying in that series is, look at how willing we are to disfigure ourselves, to try to reach this image that we're being bombarded with throughout our lives. It's a continuous bombardment. So that was my way of exploding my head by putting my head on these high-end mannequins.

LOUIS JACINTO:

They're from the different cities that as I travel ... This series will be complete when I return to Paris and photograph the high-end mannequins in those stores.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's really wonderful that you were able to turn that exercise into this empowering moment for yourself to really think about that concept

LUCY MUKERJEE:

that we all strive towards this sort of perfection that we see on billboards and in advertisements, and you were able to try it on for size, see if it really did feel like it changed your life. Can you talk about how your creative process has been affected by the pandemic? Have you been able to continue to have a creative outlet?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes, yes. I am concerned about, I don't want to catch the virus. I feel I'll die, probably, from it. So I'm doing everything I can to be very careful. I limit going out because my partner and I, we're very social, we'd go to every art opening. If I want to be involved in exhibiting my work,

LOUIS JACINTO:

then I have to go to all the art openings because out of sight, out of mind. Nobody called me during that period in the nineties when I had stopped exhibiting. It's networking. I have to be there, I need to let other artists see me, gallery owners see me, curators see me, so that they can remember, Oh, the show Louis would be perfect for it. And that's what's happened. But now in the pandemic

LOUIS JACINTO:

actually, you know what, I started a new series of work for the pandemic. I would see people's work and it was this like, okay people in line at the market, all wearing masks. And it was a ton of that. I thought that's so boring. And then I read an article about an artist that I'm aware of, and they had gotten funding to do, pictures of people in line at the grocery store wearing masks.

LOUIS JACINTO:

And it was just boring. I don't care if it's a political statement, I still want it to be a beautiful piece of art. That's my goal. Everything needs to be a beautiful piece of art regardless of the subject matter. So I thought, so then I came up with the idea, well, you know what, I'm going to also start photographing people wearing masks.

LOUIS JACINTO:

What I did then is after I took the photograph, then I digitally removed their heads. So it's just their body in the mask. And it worked, one piece has already been in a gallery show. So I guess I hit the right. I expanded. I felt like I was able to expand myself with everybody else from everyone else, taking pictures of people in masks.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Right. You elevated what we're seeing on a daily basis into an art form. That's wonderful. I also read that you've been using this time and locked down to catalog your work. Can you share a little bit about that process and where you decided to donate your work?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes. My partner had made contact with the city of Los Angeles library to donate some of his art collection about Los Angeles that he has mostly not necessarily art pieces, but paraphernalia. When I went with him to the library, I was introduced to

LOUIS JACINTO:

the woman who's in charge of the city of Los Angeles library photography department. Now I had no idea that they had one, and it is this huge department. She walked me back into the room, and the staff there are scanning negatives and cataloging everything. It's huge. Eventually, I'm going to die and if I don't have plans for my negatives

LOUIS JACINTO:

they're going to end up in the waste bin. My family's not going to know what to do with it, and not in a bad way. They're just going to like, what do we do with all this stuff? I decided to donate all of my punk rock and social commentary photographs, the negatives to the library so that they'll continue to be accessible long after I'm gone.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I chose the library because I felt that if I approached a university, they would take it, but then it wouldn't be accessible to the public. You have to be a scholar or an academic, something, to be able to go into their archives. With the city library, you don't. You can be anyone and just go in and learn from the work.

LOUIS JACINTO:

So that's what I did. I'm very excited. I've been scanning thousands of images, thousands but because of lockdown and scanning is a passive activity, I just put the negatives in. Two strips take an hour to scan at a high resolution. I just would do that while I was doing other things. All of that is complete. The library is excited that I've been able to identify who's in the images,

LOUIS JACINTO:

where, what year, -- cause they say we get so many things. We have no idea what they are. We know they're Los Angeles, but we don't know anything. They're very happy. Once they're able to come and collect it, they're ready to go. They're all boxed up and labeled. So I'm very excited that the work will not be destroyed after I'm dead. It'll continue being available to the public long after I'm gone. So I was excited about that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's so wonderful that your foresight and your meticulous organizational skills, I must say, is going to allow your Body of work to be available to the public. I think you showed such foresight in not giving it to an archive or a museum, like you said, but to a library. That's really wonderful. I think this is a good time for us to pause, we're about an hour in.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

So Andrew and Kristie, do we have, what, 10 minutes

[inaudible]? What do you think?

ANDREW LUSH:

Whatever's good for you guys.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay. I think if that's okay with you Louis, let's take 10 minutes and come back here for 1:05.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Okay.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

It'll be 1:05 for me.

LOUIS JACINTO:

It'll be 10:05 here.

ANDREW LUSH:

We'll just keep rolling because that's the easiest.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay. See you in a bit.

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LOUIS JACINTO:

Is anyone there?

ANDREW LUSH:

Yes.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Hey, how's the lighting cause it's gotten very dark here.

ANDREW LUSH:

It does look a little darker than earlier. Do you want to open up a little more light on your, I think it's your left side. Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Let's see.

ANDREW LUSH:

Overall. It was really lovely. That's great.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yeah. Okay,

ANDREW LUSH:

Perfect.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yeah. It's really cloudy and it's raining now.

ANDREW LUSH:

That's great.

[BREAK]

LOUIS JACINTO:

Hey, is the sound level okay with me?

ANDREW LUSH:

Sound is great.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I think because of the rain, the people next door are not working.

ANDREW LUSH:

Oh, right. You mentioned the construction. Well, that's a good stroke of luck,

LOUIS JACINTO:

You know, in this next section, Lucy, right?

ANDREW LUSH:

Yeah. Lucy

LOUIS JACINTO:

Lucy asked me, she wanted me to show her something that was ... Let me bring it up and see if it works on the camera.

ANDREW LUSH:

Okay, cool.

LOUIS JACINTO:

It's a framed piece. So I was thinking there might be glare on it.

ANDREW LUSH:

Okay.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I can

ANDREW LUSH:

There is glare, but it's really cool.

LOUIS JACINTO:

But you can see the image, right?

ANDREW LUSH:

Yeah.

LOUIS JACINTO:

The glare isn't covering the image. Okay.

ANDREW LUSH:

Maybe what you want to do is just angle it left and angle it right. For just a moment each way.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes.

ANDREW LUSH:

That'll kind of, at least the glare will get spread around. And I know that if you have like a photo of that, that might be a great thing to give to Jack.

LOUIS JACINTO:

So Jack would get the photographs, right?

ANDREW LUSH:

Exactly. Yeah.

ANDREW LUSH:

Welcome back, Lucy. Well y'all can start whenever you're ready -- cause we're still recording and I'll just turn my microphone and Camera off.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I was wondering if you have any copies of your magazine around

[inaudible].

LOUIS JACINTO:

Just to show them up? Sure. Let me get them.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay.

[BREAK]

[BREAK]

LOUIS JACINTO:

Okay.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Wonderful. Thank you. That's a real treat. I'd love you to introduce your magazine to the folks at home, and just talk about how that experience has been for you in getting to know artists and I think -- Is it true that you devote one issue to one artist? Is that right?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes. I call it onodream Magazine. It's one artist, one conversation. As an artist, of course, all I ever think about is me, all the time. And at one point I felt, that might not be too healthy. So I thought, you know what, I'll make up a magazine

LOUIS JACINTO:

where I interview one artist, they show me maybe 10 images of their work, and they speak to me in depth about each piece. It shows their process, but of course, within the conversation, it'll come out about their personal lives as well. I was pretty consistent when I first brought the magazine out in 2011.

LOUIS JACINTO:

It's been a little bit more sporadic since then, but it's still ongoing and I do have several interviews in the can, so they will be coming out. Here's a couple of them. Linda Smith is a ceramic artist, here in Los Angeles, and she's been in several galleries, she's always in gallery and museum shows. Here's another example,

LOUIS JACINTO:

the artist Linda Vallejo. She's been around in the art scene for many, many years. And so I talk about her Make 'Em All Mexican body of work. What she did is she got paintings, magazines, little ceramics, iconic ones,

LOUIS JACINTO:

and made all of the characters in them Mexican. It kind of broadened the worldview.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And who do you hope to feature in that series in the future?

LOUIS JACINTO:

There's an artist named Alfredo de Batuc, who has been in Los Angeles for a very long time, he paints the most incredible, surrealist images.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I'm gonna release an issue with him. I've asked a few other artists, some of them, for some reason, feel they're too shy or their work isn't important, but it actually really is. So that's going to be upcoming. It really helped me to ... I like the idea of promoting other artists.

LOUIS JACINTO:

The guideline, the loose guideline I have for the magazine is artists whom I know and whose work I admire, those two things. -- Cause then I think the conversation can be a little bit more in depth, rather than someone I've never known and interview them.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What's great about that is that you're agnostic when it comes to the medium that the artists use. That means that the interviews are going to be so diverse in terms of the people and the work that you showcase.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Hopefully. Yes. In that vein, the other thing that happened during the pandemic, I kept reading about all of these commercial art galleries that were not going to survive,

LOUIS JACINTO:

and so they started to shut down. Most of them have gone to online only. Being punk, because I'm still punk, I don't need anyone's permission to do anything. I opened an online gallery and just like the magazine, I will not be showing my own work, it will be only the work of other artists. One thing I noticed, a couple of years ago, I was in New York,

LOUIS JACINTO:

to go see one of the art museum shows that I was in, but I remember taking an entire day to go to the local art galleries in New York. I wanted to see what was happening there. What I noticed is that most of the galleries had one person shows, unlike Los Angeles which tend to have group show after group show, after group show. I noticed that difference right away.

LOUIS JACINTO:

When I opened my online art gallery in July I decided that it would be one artist, again, like the magazine, and I would give them a three month show, and I needed at least 30 pieces of artwork. So it couldn't be somebody who just is starting and has a couple of pieces. The first month, I opened with 10 pieces; then the second month, I added 10 more;

LOUIS JACINTO:

and then the final and third month, I added the other 10 to make the 30. My thinking behind that is to keep drawing people back in to see, "Oh, let's see what else they have." Also in the third month, I published a catalog of the show as well. That's been good. I've really enjoyed doing that. I'm in my third show, it opened January 1st and it features an artist named Benni Korzen.

LOUIS JACINTO:

He's an artist as well as a filmmaker. He won the Academy Award for Best Foreign film for the film Babette's Feast in 1988, I believe. So far it's been a wide variety of artists. It's only been three so far. Again, it's people that I know and whose work I admire. And we'll see how that goes.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I've enjoyed running my own gallery. I've always kind of wanted to, never to show my own work but to show the work of other artists

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That must feel like a really wonderful way to give back. I know it's a very clever way to engage the community in the arts, so kudos to you.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Thank you.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You mentioned that you feel like your approach to life is very influenced by punk, and I wonder how your family has embraced your work and responded to that. I imagine if there were younger members of your family, they probably think your experience sounds like a dream job. What has been their reaction? Do they enjoy hearing your story?

LOUIS JACINTO:

My nephews and nieces do. I have three sisters, and they all have children.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I was engaged with them when they were little children, and I have a lot of photographs of them, of course. But now that they're older, I remember two of the boys, they were really into music when they got into high school. They knew that I had done punk rock and all of that, so they would ask me, "Oh, have you heard this band?" And usually I hadn't.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I'd say, "I don't know that band. Which Beatles song do they sound like?" Of course, they would roll their eyes, but eventually they would say, Oh, they sound like this Beatles song. See, the Beatles are everything still. But no, they love that. They admire that. I have a niece, who's a pop singer. I have another nephew who is a fashion stylist.

LOUIS JACINTO:

They always tell me how much they admire me and my work and how I've just continued forward. I'm still creating and they say I'm inspirational to them. I just see them as the little kids that I've always known and loved, you know.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's wonderful that they have continued as a thread throughout your family.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thinking about your legacy, what lessons would you want to impart to the younger people watching keep, especially think about like the queer artists who are needing some encouragement.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Ah, okay. This current show, this museum show that's traveling, when it opened in Massachusetts at the end of 2019,

LOUIS JACINTO:

one of the curators was also a professor there at the campus where the show opened. He said, during the walkthrough, those of you who are in the arts, studying the arts, the work that you're creating right now is important. Make sure that you care for it, make sure that it doesn't get ruined or destroyed. When it came my turn,

LOUIS JACINTO:

I went to my photograph and I said, "What your professor said is very important. You have to take care of the work that you're creating now, because it is important." And then I pointed to my photograph, I said, "This image, that's here in this museum show, I made this when I was still in college." I told them, "What I did is I always continue to work, and I still do,

LOUIS JACINTO:

I try to take care of my body as best as I can so that I can live a long time. If that happens, you too will end up with a large body of work." Even in the pandemic, I still created a new series, the headless mask wearing people. There's always something, try it.

LOUIS JACINTO:

A lot of the things I've tried didn't work out and that's fine, but at least I tried it. Most of the time, it works out. And I'm not afraid to get feedback. When I was younger, "Oh, I just would do it. It's my thing. I don't need anybody's suggestions." Today, I'm open to suggestions. My partner is an art historian and curator.

LOUIS JACINTO:

When I'm working on something, I'll say, "How does this look? What do you think about this?" A lot of times, he goes, "Oh, try it this way." And I will go, wow. Yeah. So I'm not afraid to get people's suggestions about my work.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's wonderful. Thinking about photography specifically, it plays such an important part in documenting our lives.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And you have witnessed the significant strides in terms of civil rights, the fight against AIDS. And of course, this past summer, we saw the global uprising in defense of Black Lives. Was there photography that you encountered, of the uprising that struck you? Were you able to sort of follow, I imagine you weren't able to participate in any of the protests,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

but were you able to see some of the work that came out of those days?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes. I couldn't name any particular photographer by name. But there were so many beautiful ... Again, as I mentioned earlier, no matter what the subject matter is, I want it to be a beautiful piece of art, first and foremost. There was some images

LOUIS JACINTO:

from those black lives matter protests that were so beautiful, and those are the ones that I'm always drawn to, despite the subject matter, which could be horrific, even someone dying on the street, whatever it might be, or a police car in flames or whatever it might be. But if it was done beautifully, then for me, it worked.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Just shots of mobs and things like that, unless they're beautiful to look at, they won't interest me, although they are important to document. It is very important. I did not participate in trying to be there and capture those because we're in this pandemic. I think the last time I went to a large rally was the first Women's March right after the last individual

LOUIS JACINTO:

who was elected president. There was a Women's March all over the country. I went to the one here in Los Angeles and photographed that. That was great, to be back doing that. Some of the signage that I captured were just wonderful. I was trying to do my arty-farty stuff to make it beautiful.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Lucy you're muted.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. I was just saying, I'm always very moved when I see photos of protests and marches, when there's multiple generations, you know, like a kid on his dad's shoulders and things like that. And everyone's so engaged, it's very powerful. What advice do you have for aspiring photographers?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Is there a practice that you sort of took on as a way to keep engaged in the process? Do you take photos every day? Do you take photos indoors or just when you're outside in the world?

LOUIS JACINTO:

I don't photograph every day. Although it's easy to now, with the cameras that are in the cell phones

LOUIS JACINTO:

and they can be high quality, but I do like to have an actual camera. It's important to continue to photograph. I photograph outdoors, indoors, wherever it may be. Sometimes, I'll challenge myself. I remember a few years back, I tell myself, all year, for 12 months, I'm only going to photograph using black and white film,

LOUIS JACINTO:

which I hadn't done in eons. No digital, nothing. It was black and white film. It brought me back to the point where I had to make every shot count because it's expensive. Plus I also liked the idea that I don't get the instant gratification to look at the photograph right after I took it. I have to wait and see what came out.

LOUIS JACINTO:

And then it's like, Oh. For me it was like, Oh, I think I might still have the eye. I like to make little goals or challenges. Challenges, that's what they are, little challenges for myself. Again, I wanted to do something about the pandemic, but I was lost. I didn't want to photograph people in line at the grocery store wearing masks,

LOUIS JACINTO:

so I pushed myself. I pushed myself to try to do something else, and I came up with that mask, headless mask wearing series.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's really good advice to continue to challenge yourself and stick to specific parameters.

LOUIS JACINTO:

One thing I noticed is, with me, I won't verbalize what I'm going to do.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I will just go do it. And then I can talk about what I've done. Because I've heard many other artists, not just photographers, say I'm going to do this series on, and then they never do it. Like a photographer, they may take one or two pictures of it and then nothing happens. So I don't like to say, I'm going to do it. I'll just go do it, and then I can talk about what I've done. I think that's a better way to approach things.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I respect that. I think that applies to everything in life. If you can tell your 15 year old self one thing, what would it be?

LOUIS JACINTO:

You're on the right track. You're on the right track.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What do you think is our best quality as queer people?

LOUIS JACINTO:

The strength that we get, because the whole world wants us dead. So that's a lot of strength to keep living. And then, no more blinders. The worldview is both psychologically, physically, emotionally, wide angle. You see everything. Then you can act accordingly,

LOUIS JACINTO:

rather than the rigid blinders that we start off with.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And why is it important to you to tell you a story?

LOUIS JACINTO:

I'm a firm believer that if we don't tell our own stories, they either won't get told, ever, or they'll get told wrong.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Very true. This is a question we like to collect from all the interviewees. So humor me, if you don't mind. What is the importance of a project like OUTWORDS, an archive for queer stories.

LOUIS JACINTO:

If someone like your organization was not recording these,

LOUIS JACINTO:

they probably wouldn't allow me to tell my story, at all. Because I'm not being bombarded with requests to tell my story. And even here, I reached out to you, a friend of mine forwarded me an email that she had received -- I was aware of OUTWORDS, I had seen a job posting for them --

LOUIS JACINTO:

and but this email I got, that had been forwarded, said, this organization is looking for queer LatinX artists to tell their story, do you know of anybody? And the thing is that the person who forwarded to them, I know them. We're good friends. I don't know why she didn't send it to me directly. But anyway, when I saw that, then I reached out. I'm not afraid to reach out. I think my story's important enough -- not in an egotistical way.

LOUIS JACINTO:

But I think that my friend, Linda Vallejo, who's in this magazine, she's always telling me, you don't realize how important your work is. She's always telling me that. And I think that's the case for all of us. We don't realize how important our lives are, experiences are. And if we don't tell them, they're going to be unsaid and they're not going to be able to help others

LOUIS JACINTO:

coming up along the way behind us. So your organization is doing a worldwide service for the rest of us.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. That was beautifully said. Yeah. I think it's very important for people who are still finding their calling, figuring out what their superpower is, to be able to hear conversations with artists like yourself

LUCY MUKERJEE:

who've had so much impact and success. Is there anything else that you'd like to touch on that we haven't included yet?

LOUIS JACINTO:

You know, I have been asked in the past, like for example, my story while in college, at the United Farm Workers table one day, and then the next day at the gay student union table.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I've been asked, how could you do that? How could you be so open about it? And I said, by this time, it was already in 1975, Stonewall happened in 1969. So liberation happened, it was there, it was open, it was done. Now, if people were still like denying it, I guess, let them. But, no, it happened, the revolution was won. And so I got to sit at both tables openly, without fear.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Do you remember who the first queer person was that you saw? And this can be both on screen and in real life, in person,

LOUIS JACINTO:

There were two, if I can indulge. In the Look magazine, there was a big article about this guy who was running for his college student body president position,

LOUIS JACINTO:

and he was openly gay. I remember showing pictures of him with his boyfriend and they're on a sofa with other friends. But they also showed the little poster he made, that he put up around campus. He's sitting down on the floor and he has his arms holding up his knees, and the caption says, "Put yourself in my shoes," and he's wearing high heels.

LOUIS JACINTO:

And I thought, Oh wow. That was very impressive for me. The other person that I recall at the very beginning, in high school, after work, I would go work at a little butcher shop, around the corner from my house. It was a part-time job I had. There was a woman who would come in, her name was Lena Lemucchi.

LOUIS JACINTO:

She had a little cafe. Now, she was like butch, butch, butch. She always wore a skirt, but like butch. She would always come in and buy her hamburger meat, because all she served were hamburgers and drinks. I knew that she was queer, but only later, after I came out and started to look for other queer people and establishments that I could go to,

LOUIS JACINTO:

I was informed that Lena's Cafe was a queer place. But she wouldn't open it until like 10, 11 o'clock at night, to get all of the after-hour crowd, after the other bars had shut down, and she would stay open until four. I remember when I first went in, she saw me and she goes, "I've been waiting for you."

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Amazing. thinking about, to continue on that theme, what were some of the other safe places that you found that were queer friendly.

LOUIS JACINTO:

In my hometown?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Yeah.

LOUIS JACINTO:

When I left Bakersfield, the population was 90,000. But when I left town, there were three queer bars, two mixed bars

LOUIS JACINTO:

and Lena's cafe, so that was six places where ... Now, of course, I was under 21, so I struggled to try to stay hidden in the bar, before the bartender would say, "Hey, you're not old enough so get out." But on the weekends, they'd be packed, so I could hide for a while amongst the crowd. Those were the places we could all go. Two of the bars were mostly men, the third bar was a woman's bar.

LOUIS JACINTO:

And then the other two bars were just mixed. One was in a local hotel and the other one was just like the town skid row area, that was kind of mixed. And then Lena's Cafe.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And when you made the move to LA, was it easy to find queer friendly spaces to congregate and to sort of find your scene?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yeah, like I said, liberation had already happened, so there was tons of bars and discotheques.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Then, of course, the re-establishing of the gay student union on campus, we were out there, we had a lot of events, we would host conferences on campus where other queer groups from different universities would come. We were a very visible presence on campus and that was safe. I always felt safe. Yeah.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What year did you meet your partner?

LOUIS JACINTO:

We met in 2001. He's originally from New York. Earlier I had mentioned that I was involved with this group called Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos. We would publish a monthly newsletter, and I was in charge of working on that and having the mailing list.

LOUIS JACINTO:

And I remember that, this was back in the eighties, one of the subscribers to the magazine was this guy who lived in the Bronx, New York. Well, it turned out to be Kene, all these years later.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Wow. That's amazing. And how did you come to meet each other?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Through the personal ads in Frontiers magazine. This was pre-internet.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's amazing. Wow. It must have felt like magic when the two of you figured that out?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yeah. I was like, "Hey, did you ever?" He goes, "Yeah." I go, "Well, that was me in terms of the mailing list."

LUCY MUKERJEE:

For the folks at home who are eager to interact with your work, where would you direct them so they can see it?

LOUIS JACINTO:

My personal website, which has several bodies of work online, and that would be at onodream.com. Here's the spelling, onodream. And if people would like to visit the gallery that I opened, it's onodreamgallery.com, and I can be reached directly there.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I will get your message and then we can chit chat, if anyone listening would like to connect with me. I'd love that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's very generous. I've been enjoying reading on your personal website, they're almost like journal entries. I noticed sometimes you open those with,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

"I was just thinking about this photograph," and then you'll show the photograph and tell the story of how it came to be. I'm not sure how updated that is, is that something you're continuing to add to?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes, I think you're talking about my blog. I started a blog, the blog is louisjacinto.com. I did decide that on the blog, I would pick a photograph

LOUIS JACINTO:

and tell the story about it. Unfortunately, I have not been consistent. There's been large gaps. I'll go to it and I'll think, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe that much time has passed since my last entry." I would like to be able to be more consistent. But when I am able to do it, hopefully, they're nice little stories about the image and hopefully people like the image.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Absolutely. I'd love to know if you can sort of color in the crowds that you were running with in your punk heyday. And then when you were also photographing Sunset Junction and gay pride, who were the other people as part of your, sort of, cohort? Were they also artists?

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Were they all queer? Were they all LatinX? Tell us about them?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Well, just like I've tried to have a diverse body of work, I have always had a, I guess it would be called, diverse set of friends, ethnically, racially, etcetera. I just felt, like I said, when I moved to Los Angeles, I thought it was very segregated.

LOUIS JACINTO:

And that was not my experience in Bakersfield. I remember just having friends who were from different backgrounds than my own, that's what felt natural to me. I continued that here in Los Angeles. Just natural, because that's all I knew how to do, how to make friends. Initially, moving here, not knowing anybody and then making my first friends from campus,

LOUIS JACINTO:

they were a wide mixture of kids. Some activists; some artists; some, just students, studying whatever it was they were studying. And then when punk happened, not all of my friends were into punk. They were like, "Ooh, that's a little awful." We still stayed friends.

LOUIS JACINTO:

But they were kind of interested because I was gung-ho for it. When punk happened here, there was a cellar in a building off of Hollywood Boulevard, that was like the place where all the punk bands rehearsed, and then at night they'd give shows. That place lasted for a few months before the fire department shut it down.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Suddenly, there was no place for the punk bands to play, at all. What happened, there was an art collective called Asco, from East LA. It was these four LatinX artists Gronk, Patssi Valdez, Willie Herron, Harry Gamboa. What they started doing is, at their art openings, they started asking punk bands to come and play at the art openings. So it was this wild scene. You'd have all the Asco followers,

LOUIS JACINTO:

the artsy fartsy ones, then you'd have all these punks. And then everybody else, like the disco crowd or whatever, the activist crowd, they were like, "What's going on over there, I'm going to go check it out." So everybody would show up from all of these different circles. Everybody was there, at those events. That was my crowd. I had friends in the disco crowd.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I had friends in the community organizing crowd. I had my friends in the punk crowd. I had friends who were just photographers only, who did studio work only. The idea of walking outdoors with a camera was so foreign to them. It was just this wide range of people that were my friends and acquaintances, and we just hung out and did our things. Some of my friends didn't like each other, but that was between them. It wasn't between me and them

LUCY MUKERJEE:

For those at home who aren't too familiar with Asco. Can you tell us a little bit about that organization and the work that they did?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Asco, initially, were four artists. When I moved to Los Angeles, I met Gronk who was one of the people in Asco, that was in 1975. They had already been doing all their art things.

LOUIS JACINTO:

A lot of their work was performance art. They did paintings and things like that, but they did a lot of performance art, which is peripheral. I became friends with Gronk, then I started going to his art openings. I knew that there were three others with him in this collective that they called themselves Asco. But to me, again,

LOUIS JACINTO:

they were big stars because they were having shows in galleries. I was just this kid still in college and I had a camera and I would shoot the events that they were doing. But I never became friends with the other three, again, kind of like with the punk bands. To me, they were these stars and I wasn't, so I kept that distance. But I was friends with Gronk. We have stayed friends through all these years.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Since then, I have become friends with the others, especially good friends with Patssi Valdez. I'm more acquaintances with the other two, Willie and Harry. But Asco, I felt was punk. They were also not asking permission to do their artworks. They were not being accepted by the mainstream art scene, they were not being accepted by the Chicano art scene,

LOUIS JACINTO:

but they didn't care. They continued to create their art. A lot of it was very avant garde. Also, performance pieces, which were done once, and then that was it. If you saw it, great. If you didn't, if there was any documentation of it, like via photographs then that was the only way you were going to be able to experience it later.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I think it's an overlooked aspect in cultural Los Angeles history that Asco really was a lifeline to the punk bands. During that period where the bands had no place to play and Asco provided a venue to them by having them play at their art openings. It was great to see the punk bands there, because it was usually in a small gallery, there was no stage, the band was just playing in the middle of the room.

LOUIS JACINTO:

You were right there right next to them. It was just incredible. And of course, like I said, everybody was there, the art followers, the punk followers, and then everybody else who was interested in saying, "What are these people doing? We better go check it out so we're not left out."

LUCY MUKERJEE:

It sounds amazing, just the idea of the different scenes coming together, a punk band thing and then the art gallery, just sounds very surreal.

LOUIS JACINTO:

It was just great.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

When you look back over your career, your experiences in life, what are you most proud of?

LOUIS JACINTO:

I would think the punk scene. My generation -- we're in the middle of the baby boomers -- we gave you punk and rap,

LOUIS JACINTO:

and those two genres came out at the same time. So I always say, and people hate it, but I always say, to the younger kids, "We're still waiting to give us something new. So far, punk and rap have been the last new things that have appeared we're awaiting." I'm proud of that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What do you think were the most challenging times in your life?

LOUIS JACINTO:

The AIDS epidemic was devastating. Friends died, acquaintances died, people you didn't know were just dying left and right. It was a death sentence, once you got it, that was it. You were going to die. That part was very sad, but it was also empowering in two aspects that I recall:

LOUIS JACINTO:

queer women stepped up and started taking care of the men and being in charge. That was wonderful to see. And also, the closet door was forever destroyed. Completely, 100%. And it has never been closed. Unfortunately, it took that tragedy to do that, but it did it

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Beautiful. Do you go back to Bakersfield often? Do you have family there still?

LOUIS JACINTO:

Yes.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

How has it changed

LOUIS JACINTO:

The town? It was 90,000, today it's 400,000. But it's still very conservative, small minded. I loved growing up there. Everything was there, everything was there. But I knew as a teen that I didn't want to live there as an adult.

LOUIS JACINTO:

I just knew culturally, it would be a wasteland. I wanted to be where I could go to a museum and to art shows and to films and other events, and Bakersfield didn't have that. As a kid, it did. We had concerts coming to town, and I would be able to go to them and all that kind of stuff.

LOUIS JACINTO:

But I knew as an adult, it wouldn't be enough. I needed more options for me, plus I figured there'd be more queer people in Los Angeles as well.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Right. I think many people listening to this will be able to relate to that. I think this has been really magnificent. You've shed so many gems of wisdom.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And we're getting to the last few minutes. I wanted to ask you what else you'd like to share, and if you have any parting words for the people listening,

LOUIS JACINTO:

You don't need permission ever, ever again. The fight has been won and it's up to us individually

LOUIS JACINTO:

to keep showing that it has been won. And to quote the phrase that came out during the AIDS epidemic in the eighties, Silence Equals Death. So shout as loud as you can every single time.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. What a pleasure this has been.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Thank you. Thank you for saying yes to my outreach to you to be considered. Hopefully anyone listening will like my story. But thank you for doing this. It's such important work that you're doing.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you for inviting us into your home. This has been lovely.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Andrew and Kristie, is there anything else that you need from us?

ANDREW LUSH:

That's it. Kristie, go ahead and hit stop on the OBS recording and I'm going to hit stop on the zoom recording here.

ANDREW LUSH:

Thank you so much, Lucy. It was just a pleasure to sit and listen while I did other OUTWORDS work.

LOUIS JACINTO:

Thank you, Lucy.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

You're a wonderful subject. Thanks.